A Man from the Parallel Universe

The original story sounds unbelievable but very appealing…

Original Story

It’s July 1954; a hot day. A man arrives at Tokyo airport in Japan. He’s of Caucasian appearance and conventional-looking. But the officials are suspicious. On checking his passport, they see that he hails from a country called Taured. The passport looked genuine, except for the fact that there is no such country as Taured – well, at least in our dimension.

The man is interrogated, and asked to point out where his country supposedly exists on a map.

He immediately points his finger towards the Principality of Andorra, but becomes angry and confused. He’s never heard of Andorra, and can’t understand why his homeland of Taured isn’t there. According to him it should have been, for it had existed for more than 1,000 years!

Customs officials found him in possession of money from several different European currencies. His passport had been stamped by many airports around the globe, including previous visits to Tokyo.

Baffled, they took him to a local hotel and placed him in a room with two guards outside until they could get to the bottom of the mystery. The company he claimed to work for had no knowledge of him, although he had copious amounts of documentation to prove his point.

The hotel he claimed to have a reservation for had never heard of him either. The company officials in Tokyo he was there to do business with? Yup, you’ve guessed it – they just shook their heads too. Later, when the hotel room he was held in was opened, the man had disappeared. The police established that he could not have escaped out of the window – the room was several floors up, and there was no balcony.

He was never seen again, and the mystery was never solved.

How it Developed

This story, often called the “Man from Taured,” has become one of modern history’s most well-known urban legends about alternate or parallel universes. The tale has been adapted into books and is a favorite topic on TikTok and YouTube, engaging both conspiracy theorists and social media users who are simply curious.

It has also become a subject for the Movie “The Man from Taured”, released in 2015 by Director Nick Christensen.

Many authors, including Bryan Alaspa and Jeremy Bates who both wrote books inspired by the story of the man from Taured, have tried to explain this bizarre event, by delving into possibilities which usually belong to the realms of science fiction.

One of the most notable explanations for this incident is that the man from Taured had somehow passed through a parallel dimension by accident, ending up at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Following this line of logic, the hypothesis is that there is a parallel Earth, similar to our own, with the exception that the location known as Andorra here is known as Taured over there. Another proposal is that the man was a time traveler from the future, though this interpretation is arguably more problematic than the one supposing inter-dimensional travel.

While it is entirely possible that the story of the man from Taured was a figment of someone’s imagination which eventually became an urban legend, it has also been suggested that a similar incident did indeed occur. This more mundane story could have been embellished each time it was told, so much so that it eventually evolved into the great mystery that continues to fascinate today.

The Truth

The story of the “Man from Taured” has been heavily sensationalized, but it does originate from an actual incident, according to news sources at the time.

However, this incident was not about alternate universes, but a simple case of fraud.

First of all, the year was not 1954, but 1959. The man, identified as John Allen Kuchar Zegrus, had been traveling with his phony passport for some time, somehow managing to trick other countries. Unfortunately for him, his scheme ended in Japan, where he was convicted of illegal entry and fraud at the age of 36 in April 1960.

Zegrus reportedly traveled to Japan with his Korean wife from Taipei. He was not arrested until he cashed forged checks to cover the costs of their stay in the country, as per fact-checker Snopes.com, which also exposed the truth behind the legend.

A Tokyo judge reportedly sentenced Zegrus to one year in prison. From there, the situation took a much darker turn: After his sentence was interpreted, Zegrus stood and slashed his arms with a piece of broken glass that he had hidden in his mouth, declaring, “I’m going to kill myself!”

Zegrus was reportedly rushed to a nearby hospital, and it is here where his reported timeline ends. It is understood that he eventually served his sentence, but who he truly was and where he actually came from remains a mystery. His wife, who was 30 at the time, was reportedly repatriated to South Korea. It is unclear what happened to her.

Some believe Zegrus came from Algeria. This is due to his citation of places called Tamanrasset (which he claimed to be the capital of Taured “south of the Sahara”) and Tuared (a variation of the spelling of Taured, which is thought to be a misspelled version of Tuareg). Tamanrasset is the name of a province in Algeria, while Tuareg is an ethnic Islamic group that primarily lives in the Sahara, including southern Algeria.